First Place: Rockingham Creative Writing Competition (Emerging Writer)
2020
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This is the final leaving, but there are many times I've left before; big and small, noticed and unnoticed, in increments or like a fire cracker. This time, I am submerged in my old-woman-body, skin too large for me, like I've shrunk away from the edges, and I wonder if I am afraid to bump up against myself. This life could make anyone afraid, with its relentless march forwards, not stopping for any of us.
I look out the bedroom window and my eyes rest on the plane trees, planted by Bill as a fire break nearly twenty years ago now. Luminous they are in their green, a stark contrast to the muted olives of the eucalypts in the bush beyond them. It shimmers in my eyes even when I look away, that green of the northern hemisphere.
These are the things I know about leaving. Leaving is a shock, a tearing of your expectations. Leaving can be life saving and it can be crippling. Leaving is disorienting and can take a long time to do, and a long time to recover from. Sometimes you leave and come back. Leaving can be terrifying, like a blind leap into the unknown, and you can laugh uproariously or cry shamelessly as you do it. Leaving is a connection broken, one you thought you needed. Leaving is woven into the very fabric of arriving, there at the moment of birth, unavoidable and ignored. Leaving is small death and practise for the main event. Leaving is inevitable.
When I told my first husband I was leaving, he didn't say a word. He took his car keys and went out the front door, taking his heavy silent sadness with him, and he didn't return until the long hours of the night had almost forgotten him. I was asleep in the spare bedroom, dog at my feet and child on my pillow, her soft breath on my face, when the key turned in the lock. I started awake, listening for his footsteps, wondering if he had found something to say, and wondering if I truly wanted to hear it. Years of inching away from him, little pieces at first and then huge gaping chunks, and if he noticed he never said. With his averted eyes, he didn't see me reaching into the secret fertile places of my imagination. He didn't know how busy I had been, imagining a life without him.
His footsteps carried on to our bedroom and he closed the door and locked it with a soft click. He stayed there while I packed two suitcases the following morning, and he stayed there as I walked out of the house with our daughter, up the driveway and into my father’s waiting car. I learned with that man that unspoken words can hurt more than a slap to the face, which will at least leave you stinging and knowing you're alive.
From the doorway of the bedroom I watch Bill make the dinner, and he is always the same. Through my slow blinking eyes, on my side where he's propped me, I see him put the potatoes on the bench and slowly peel them with a paring knife, scraps going onto the small plate next to him. He chops them small and scrapes them off the jarrah chopping board into the pot, going out of my sight while he puts them on the stove to boil. No rush. Radio tuned to talk-back, turned low. Looking up every now and then to see if my eyes are open or closed, lifting a glass to me with a question in his eyes. No, not thirsty. Just let me watch you. Next are the beans, ends trimmed and chopped into even lengths, into another pot. The clang of the old blackened frying pan out onto the stove, ready for his steak. You can't have a conversation with Bill when he's making the dinner, and he only knows how to make different versions of the same meal. It doesn't matter. He will puree the vegetables for me and sit beside me, his own meal balanced on a tray on his lap, while I try to eat a little. Every now and then he will reach out a hand to pat my leg, and I will try to smile at him.
The nights can be the hardest, and the pain worst. Bill in the spare room so he can get some proper sleep and me left alone with my meandering mind for hours on end. I don't want to go to the places it takes me (my mind) in those hours, but it is as though the memories are building momentum, as though I have to gather them all up in order to take them with me when I go. Maybe there are threads connecting each of us to our memories, our people and places, and they cannot stay in the world without us. At the end, we have to gather them all to us again and take them with us when we go. Tomorrow, the hospice care nurse will visit again, and I will ask her for more of those tablets that help me find some oblivion in sleep. And I will tell her more of my surfacing memories, for there is a compulsion now, not only to gather them up, but to unspool them into the ears of whoever will listen. It makes me remember my grandfather, steeped in the past, me sitting and listening in his old musty lounge room, and I understand, now. You have to tell them as you collect them. You have to find the right order for them, the right place to put it all.
Tonight, again, my memories are brushed with the colour of leaving, and I do not want their company. As I lay in my bed I see my daughter's face as I left her with my mother after the divorce, drawing at the small table, careful inside the lines, careless in her goodbye. I see my father's disapproving face, his heavy sigh and retreat to the back yard to smoke. The night as I walked to where the taxi was waiting, something heaving inside of me that I could not control, not knowing yet that I would live with that heaving beast inside me always. How little they said when I could finally send for my child; I saw my mother only twice after that, and my father not at all. I don't want to think about my sisters and how they all left before me, of everyone who has left before me and how hard it was to say goodbye, but even harder to live the days without them in them. I don't want to think about everyone that I will leave, now that it is my turn, and how they will feel in the days without me in them. I don't want to think about how all of them will carry on without me and I will see none of it; of Bill alone in the kitchen, in the garden, visiting his family, the deep ache of his loneliness. So many things I do not want to think about, but in the night they find me. I won’t make up bedtime stories for easy comfort. But if ever there was a time I can understand why people do, and call it religion, it is now. How easy I could rest, to think they would all be there waiting for me on the other side, with all forgiven.
Ahh, but here, now, this is a memory I can welcome. I am remembering the leaving of summer, that magic time of the year, always my favourite. In this place, if you don't pay attention, you will miss it. The seasons don't shout their arrival and departure here, you have to sink into the place, spend time, get to know it. I am letting my mind travel to that holiday with Bill and my Susie, by then our Susie, mine and Bills, in the absence of anyone else to claim her. She was twelve by then, and we were camped by the coast, the days full of the ease of each other. The air still hot, but a coolness creeping into it at the end of the day. That sea breeze that had kept us company and kept us cool for months now absent in the afternoon, leaving a balmy stillness. The ocean, spread flat and glistening, none of the chop of the summer. The days starting to slowly, slowly shorten. All of us plumping up with possibility again. If I let the images spread through me, filling me, I can float on them, away from the pain in my body. This is my autumn. It has been hard, to hold on. It has been hard to stay rich and lubricated, amongst all of the comings and goings.
Leaving, though inevitable, makes me afraid, and I tell small lies to Bill to make it bearable. His feet are firmly on the side of staying, and he does not yet understand, and I do not want him to. He cannot see, as he tenderly bathes my limbs and soft belly, the wide open exposed truth being laid bare inside of me. But he knows, because he stays close and he loves me patiently, that I am stretching away from him in increments. Yesterday, as he rinsed and squeezed the cloth in the plastic tub, he winked and said 'Harri, you really need to start pulling your weight around here love; you can't just be lying around and letting me do all the work. Enough is enough.' My Bill, finding humour as he always has, using it to cover his wet eyes and his worried mind. But I see him look at me searchingly, and I know he is wondering how long we have got, how many days, and how many hours.
Susie is here now, and I have been waiting for her. She is my final permission. As she sits and holds my hand, stroking gently with her thumb and speaking of ordinary things, I see that in the end, the number of things that really truly matter, is small.
There is leaving, but then there is coming home, and Bill was always my coming home. Feet planted firmly on the earth, arms out to catch me, holding me, finally, in place. As I move further away from them both now, my Bill and my Susie, pulled faster and faster towards the big pain and the big unknowing, I cannot know if there will be anything to catch me this time. But it doesn't matter now, for it is too late,
I am rushing, racing past them, a last finger brush,
I am racing past all of the parts that have been discarded along the way,
reaching and gathering them up, quickly now, rushing and gathering,
all those lost pieces in my arms again,
as I am pulled forward, relentlessly forward,
the real force of life’s momentum revealed now, shocking in it's choicelessness.
I am in life’s arms now, as I see I always have been and I cannot tell if this is a final leaving or if it is my very first arrival.